Your colleagues Stéphanie Gaudet (Social Sciences) and Ivy Bourgeault (Telfer) are running a study on the health of academic women at work. We encourage you to participate! Please read the invitation and Ethics Approval Notice enclosed. Academic women who are members of either the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa (APUO) or the Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA) may participate in this study.

We would like to invite you to participate in a 10-minute online survey that we are conducting in conjunction with the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA), APUO and other Ontario faculty associations.

The purpose of the survey is to provide insight into your views of current issues in Ontario’s higher education sector, including controversial policies that will affect professors and academic librarians directly. In addition, we are asking for your views on how you prefer to receive information from, and engage with, APUO and OCUFA.

Your responses to this survey will inform the activities and advocacy efforts of APUO and OCUFA. They will help to ensure that our work reflects the interests and concerns of our members, and that we are effective advocates for you at the local and provincial level. Our surveys usually receive a very high response rate.

As a token of our appreciation for completing this survey, OCUFA will be giving away two iPad Minis to two survey respondents from all participating faculty associations. To enter the prize draw, please complete the contact information request at the end of the questionnaire. If you do not wish to enter the prize draw, you can still complete the questionnaire.

Please be assured that your responses will remain anonymous and your personal information kept strictly private–your contact information will not be linked to your survey responses. APUO will receive the local data from this survey. Aggregate data from all participating faculty associations will be made available to OCUFA for provincial-level analysis.

As you know, over the last several years the APUO has taken a variety of steps to become more responsive to its members and to communicate more regularly and efficiently.

As part of this effort, we are now creating a database of additional member contact information so that we can get in touch with members more effectively, especially during periods when many of our members are away from their official emails and offices. This will be especially relevant this summer as it is quite possible that we will need to update and dialogue with the membership urgently as collective negotiations progress.

Furthermore, since we do not control the university’s email servers, we cannot guarantee their confidentiality or their reliability. As such, having alternative means of contacting you will also provide a measure of security that cannot be guaranteed on the university system.